May 31, 2008

An embattled and unpopular political leader doesn't generally enhance his standing at home by means of a transatlantic photo-opportunity with the head of a lame-duck administration that evinces little interest in the outside world. But George Bush has evidently decided to ignore the risk of taint by association, and is visiting Gordon Brown next month regardless.

That's a generous gesture in the circumstances. We now know that Brown has a lower approval rating as PM than John Major did, and that Labour under Brown is a less electorally appealing proposition than the party was under Michael Foot.

Stephen Pollard, who has long been a Brown-basher, has his own take on the PM's plight. I would put it this way. It's a common theme among sympathetic and critical media commentators alike that, as PM, Brown has confounded his political and intellectual promise. This seems to me a serious misreading. The PM has in fact fulfilled what political observers knew of him. Consider the official evidence of a report last December, commissioned by Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary. As The Times reported its conclusions:

The most scathing criticism involves the Treasury’s failure to work with other Whitehall departments. During his ten years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Brown surrounded himself with a small coterie of advisers who dictated policy from the Treasury. Other departments were largely expected to fall in line with little negotiation or consultation.

What Gordon Brown wrought at HMT is how he handles government now. As the head of an administration he is useless. This is not merely a story of hubris: a man who plotted obsessively for more than a decade to become PM, and then found his attainment turn to ashes. It's a more prosaic story of incompetence and bluster. Brown was never up to the job. He has been a block on effective government since 1997. He also did more than anyone to undermine Tony Blair as Labour leader.

Imagine how history might have been different. If Blair had not run for the Labour leadership after the death of John Smith in 1994, and left the field clear for Brown, it would have been a catastrophic mistake for Labour and a severe one for the country.

May 28, 2008

Gordon Brown said yesterday that Britain would sign a treaty banning cluster munitions. The treaty is being formulated at an international conference in Dublin. It has weighty supporters. “Such a treaty will establish a new benchmark for the responsible projection of force in the modern world,” wrote nine leading military figures in a letter to this newspaper.

They are wrong. The case for a “new benchmark” is a fallacy that will undermine collective security. The treaty's greatest impact will be not in protecting civilians but in hampering the military capability of the states that are most scrupulous in limiting the destructiveness of warfare.

Cluster munitions are weapons that subdivide into smaller bombs when fired. They then disperse across a wide area. Sometimes these bomblets fail to explode. If they are disturbed later, they may maim or kill civilians.

There is one state, Laos, where unexploded ordnance remains a serious threat to civilians. But Laos is an exception. Last year confirmed casualties throughout the world from cluster munitions amounted to fewer than 400. These are individual tragedies. They do not amount, in aggregate, to anything approaching the humanitarian issue raised by, say, the trade in small arms.

The diplomatic efforts to ban cluster munitions, moreover, have costs. These weapons are not indiscriminate, and they do have a place in warfare. They are effective against moving or dispersed targets such as tank formations and airfields. If they are not used against such targets, then something else will be: probably rocket barrages or massed artillery. These have a humanitarian impact too - in civilian lives and in destroying infrastructure - and there will be more of them.

Campaigners might ask themselves whether the best means of limiting the civilian casualties of cluster bombs is in increasing the weapons' reliability and precision rather than banning them.

The most enduring costs of an extensive treaty, however, will be to the solidarity of Nato. The United States insists on the option of using cluster munitions. The US is not merely one state among many. In the absence of world government, it is the provider and guarantor of collective security. Under the terms of the treaty, military personnel might face criminal prosecution if they operated alongside US forces.

Collective security is the foundation of our defence policy. This ostensibly humanitarian campaign strikes at the heart of it, to the future benefit of aggressors everywhere.

May 27, 2008

"No doubt this excellent man's bid for the Republican nomination was by way of being a romantic gesture," wrote Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Guardian a couple of months ago. He was referring to Ron Paul.

Today's Washington Post reveals Paul's campaign to have had a more tangible aspect: the candidate appointed his family to run it, and he paid them nearly $170,000 for their efforts:

Paul's granddaughter Valori Pyeatt helps organize fundraising receptions and has been paid $17,157. Another granddaughter, Laura Paul ($2,724), handles orders for Ron Paul merchandise. Grandson Matthew Pyeatt ($3,251) manages Paul's MySpace profile. Daughter Peggy Paul ($2,224) helps with campaign logistics. The candidate's sons Randall and Robert and his daughter Joy Paul LeBlanc have all been paid for campaign travel and for appearing as surrogates at political events. Who keeps track of all these finances? Paul's brother and daughter, naturally, who have been paid a combined $62,740 to handle the campaign's accounting.

Also in the Post, note that "Sen. John McCain broke today with President Bush's new policy on North Korea, co-authoring an opinion article with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in which he called for a return to Bush's original demand of a complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament of North Korea's nuclear programs".

This has to be right. There is a seductive case (advanced cogently here by Morton Abramowitz and Stephen Bosworth) for some sort of grand bargain with Pyongyang - which would probably accomplish the opposite of what its advocates wish for, i.e. it would stimulate tension rather than ameliorate it. I share the views of Christopher Hitchens, in a recent open letter to the President:

It would be pardonable, perhaps, Mr. President, if a slightly dishonorable concession on the human-rights front did in fact lead to a verifiable gain in disarmament and regional security. But by the very same token, it would be unforgivable if a further cynical stalling and postponement of non-proliferation were to be accompanied by an extension of the hellish regime of Kim Jong Il, and of the wretchedness and misery of North Korean life, not a day of which any of us could hope to endure. Your administration can still hope to be remembered for insisting that North Korea cannot be just a little bit nuclear, or partially or incompletely disarmed, as well as for stating boldly that Korea cannot long continue half slave and half free.

In The Guardian, the playwright Mark Ravenhill condemns the "carping critics" who engage in "Brecht-bashing". I enjoy a good dose of Brecht-bashing myself, and referred last week to the excellent article by my comrade in this noble venture, Nick Cohen, who is among Ravenhill's targets. In a magnificent non sequitur, Ravenhill invokes Richard Strauss, whose art has many admirers (including me). But Strauss's complicity, at best, with Nazism is universally execrated. Brecht's abominable political record is not popularly regarded in the same way; that is the point. Take Ravenhill's own conclusion, for example:

But Brecht found more in East Germany than a home to make theatre: he believed that the state's system, hugely imperfect as he knew it to be, was the best bulwark against fascism returning to post-war Europe. After the brutal age he had lived through, it's surely a decision we can understand, even if we can't all condone it.

No, it's bloody well not a decision I can understand. The "bulwark against fascism" to which Brecht gave obeisance was headed by Walter Ulbricht. In 1932, Ulbricht had actively co-operated with the Nazis in the Berlin transport strike, which gave crucial impetus in Hitler's rise to power. In 1940, when he was in exile in Stockholm, he had shamelessly betrayed to the Gestapo comrades who had failed to support the party line over the Nazi-Soviet pact. The "imperfect system" that Ulbricht ruled over famously crushed with Soviet tanks a workers' uprising in East Berlin on 17 June 1953. (Documents from the GDR archives reveal that the tanks came at Ulbricht's personal request.) Brecht's response to this brutal repression was to write to Ulbricht pledging loyalty.

It is extraordinary, and it nicely confirms Nick's original point, that a remark such as Ravenhill's can be published in a leading national daily. Ravenhill's judgement is ignorant and toxic, and I'm sorry to see it in a newspaper that professes liberal traditions.

The BBC reports a development that is as disturbing as it ought to have been predictable:

The UN nuclear watchdog has said it believes Iran is still withholding information on its nuclear programme. In a report, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says Tehran's alleged weapons development studies remain a matter of serious concern. It adds that Iran is operating 3,500 centrifuges, the machines used to enrich uranium, at its plant at Natanz.

I commented the other day that the famed US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear programme explicitly did not consider the question of uranium enrichment. That's some caveat.

The enrichment facility at Natanz was established secretly. We know about it only because, as the BBC notes, Iranian dissidents revealed its existence in 2002. It is not necessary for a civil nuclear programme. Even so, the EU-3 have proposed a compromise (which the Bush administration has accepted) whereby Iran would be able to enrich uranium on the territory of a third party, Russia. Yet the mullahs carry on dissembling and evading UN requirements.

The history of Iran's tergiversations on this issue suggests that the regime will respond to international demands, but only under pressure. If the UN is to be an effective agent of disarmament and the diplomatic resolution of disputes, then it's essential that the members of the Security Council show solidarity and gumption on this. The issue can't be left just to the US and the UK to deal with, as happened with Saddam Hussein's serial flouting of UNSC resolutions. I'm sure those who condemned the American-led intervention in Iraq on the grounds that it lacked explicit authority from the UN Security Council would be the first to agree.

May 26, 2008

As London Mayor, Ken Livingstone negotiated a deal whereby Venezuela would provide cut-price fuel for London buses. For reasons I argued towards the end of this post, I had strong reservations about this deal. Accordingly, I welcome Boris Johnson's early decision not to renew it.

Livingstone's response, incidentally, is characteristic and indicative of why he was unfit for public office. He declares: "The fact that the first significant action by Johnson's Tory regime is against the poorest people in the capital is highly significant as is the cowardly way he has made the announcement on bank holiday Sunday without any consultation with the organisations representing the thousands of carers, single parents and others affected."

Livingstone never gave adequate information about the oil deal. It therefore bore the hallmark of a political rather than an economic decision, undertaken with an autocratic regime that a progressive politician ought to have avoided. Livingstone's insistence, moreover, that the task of the Mayor is to "consult" with pressure groups indicates how he sees politics. He ran his administration as a fiefdom within and a lobbyists' playground without. I'm glad he's gone.

I've recommended before the work of Ben Goldacre, who writes the "Bad Science" column in The Guardian. This splendid piece last year about Gillian McKeith, purveyor of nutritional mumbo-jumbo and holder of a non-accredited correspondence-course PhD, is a case in point. Here's another one, from Saturday's paper, about something called the Dore Programme for dyslexia. The issues Ben raises have far wider application than his own medical specialism. Against much Guardian precedent, the comments thread underneath the article is illuminating too.

There was a curious piece in The New Statesman earlier this month by Noam Chomsky on the radical ferment of 1968. According to Chomsky:

One of the most interesting reactions to come out of 1968 was in the first publication of the Trilateral Commission, which believed there was a "crisis of democracy" from too much participation of the masses. In the late 1960s, the masses were supposed to be passive, not entering into the public arena and having their voices heard. When they did, it was called an "excess of democracy" and people feared it put too much pressure on the system. The only group that never expressed its opinions too much was the corporate group, because that was the group whose involvement in politics was acceptable.

The Trilateral Commission did not exist in 1968. It was formed in 1973, and the report Chomsky is referring to on the "crisis of democracy" was published in 1975. You can read it here. Written by Samuel Huntington, Michel Crozier and Joji Watanuki, it argues that the demands on democratic government are increasing while the capacity of democratic government is stagnating. This was a widespread theme in writings about the "ungovernability" or "overload" of Western democracies in the 1970s.

The authors of the report do refer briefly to an adversary culture, but this is a minor point. The theoretical roots of this critique had nothing to do with the radical demands of 1968. Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, 1965, was a pioneering work. It argued that liberal democracies were prone to institutional sclerosis, owing to the role of pressure groups in defending sectional interests. There was a lot to this argument, as well. Until very recently, it was a central issue in German political debate.

I've referred once or twice to the one-member party recently formed as the British People's Alliance, under the leadership of David Lindsay. Mr Lindsay posted a comment on this site demanding that the junta that runs this country put me up as its candidate in London in the next European elections, where I shall be overwhelmed by the British People's Alliance.

The British People's Alliance, as I understand it, favours a military coup to sweep away our decadent political class. It is opposed to abortion, contraception, immigration and the European Union. Several readers have provided interesting further information about the party in my comments threads. I'm indebted particularly to the reader who has alerted me to an interview with Mr Lindsay about the British People's Alliance on a radio programme called Wolverhampton Politics ("political debate and discussion from a Wolverhampton perspective"). It was conducted in January, and you can listen to it here. You should fast-forward 44 minutes into the programme, unless, of course, you have a particular interest in political debate and discussion from a Wolverhampton perspective, in which case you will have much to enjoy beforehand.

May 25, 2008

As I'm on the subject of the pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, I'll quote one of his observations about religion. Hook was an unbeliever from a young age. In an essay entitled "Religion and the Intellectuals", published in Partisan Review in 1950 (and included in his book The Quest for Being, 1961, pp. 95-102), he wrote:

So long as religion is freed from authoritarian institutional forms, and conceived in personal terms, so long as overbeliefs are a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness, a discipline of living with pain and evil, otherwise unendurable and irremediable, so long as what functions as a vital illusion or poetic myth is not represented as public truth to whose existence the once-born are blind, so long as religion does not paralyze the desire and the will to struggle against unnecessary cruelties of experience, it seems to me to fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended. In this sense, a man's personal religion justifies itself to him in the way his love does. Why should he want to make a public cult of it? And why should we want him to prove that the object of his love is the most lovely creature in the world? Nonetheless it still remains true that as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability.

This has long seemed to me all that can reasonably be said about claims to religious truth. But Hook's principle also prescribes a particular way of dealing with religious believers. Treating purely private devotion as a choice in which rational criticism may be suspended is clearly not what, say, Richard Dawkins does. I'm consequently often uneasy about the way that Dawkins approaches the task of promoting free thought. (This was the gist of an argument I made here.)

Yet I wonder to what extent Hook is talking of an unrealisable principle. If you consider yourself in possession of knowledge derived from revelation, then there must surely be a constant temptation for you to try to convince others of your doctrines about first and last things. This is clearly true of a lay member of the Church of England Synod, Paul Eddy, who - as the BBC reports - is pressing for the Church to evangelise explicitly for the conversion of Muslims. Mr Eddy has secured enough support to have his motion debated at Synod:

Speaking to the Sunday programme on BBC Radio Four, he said that in an effort to be inclusive and inoffensive, the church had "lost its nerve" and was "not doing what the Bible says".

"Both Christianity and Islam are missionary faiths," he said. "For years, we have sent missionaries throughout the whole world, but when we have the privilege of people of all nations on our doorstep, we have a responsibility as the state church to share the gospel of Jesus Christ."

I don't consider Mr Eddy is in any respect malign (though I do think he's deluded). The great Protestant social thinker Reinhold Niebuhr - like Hook, an influential figure on the anti-totalitarian Left - mounted a sophisticated and seminal argument for why Christians ought to refrain from missionary activity among the Jews. Such activities, Niebuhr wrote ("The Relations of Christians and Jews in Western Civilization", 1958, collected in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1987, p. 198), were "wrong because the two faiths, despite differences, are sufficiently alike for the Jew to find God more easily in terms of his own religious heritage than by subjecting himself to the hazards of guilt feeling involved in a conversion to a faith, which whatever its excellencies, must appear to him as a symbol of an oppressive majority culture".

But much as I admire Niebuhr's principles of social criticism, I suspect they derive less from theological insight than from his being a humane and liberal-minded man. What, moreover, would a theologian of similar outlook say about a mission to the Muslims? He might conceivably make an expedient reply that Islam too is a religion of the book, a monotheism of similar inspiration to Christianity and Judaism. But I can understand how an evangelical such as Mr Eddy would find this a frustrating diminution of the good news.

This is a general point about religious faith, and especially its Christian variants. If you know the will of God, or at least know who is God's intermediary in the communication of those truths, then it is presumptively unlikely that you will be content to leave alone those of us who are not in a state of grace. This is why religion is not a benign or even a neutral force in human affairs. It is essentially (if not in all particulars) a destructive one. That is the principal reason I am not only an unbeliever but an enemy of revealed truths.

I omitted to comment last week on an article by Nick Cohen in The Observer about Bertolt Brecht. Nick rightly terms Brecht "a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism".

I've written about Brecht here. The writer I'd compare him to is Maxim Gorky: an author of a handful of outstanding works that transcend the limitations of his politics, but whose writing as a body is corrupted by an absolutist and fanatical ideology.

Note in particular the illuminating anecdote at the end of Nick's article about a meeting (the third and last) between Brecht and the American philosopher Sidney Hook in New York in 1935. Hook undemonstratively showed Brecht the door when Brecht unabashedly defended the Moscow trials and the purges. The story comes from Hook's memoirs, Out of Step, 1987, p. 493. (Hook had first recounted this story in print in an article entitled "A Recollection of Bertolt Brecht", in The New Leader, 10 October 1960.)

I tried recently to introduce readers of "Comment is Free" to the political significance of Sidney Hook, but without great hopes of success. I commend his plain speaking and anti-totalitarianism to my readers.

Hook was never a member of the Communist Party, but he was at one time a fellow traveller. In the 1932 presidential election he supported the Communist candidature of William Z. Foster sooner than vote for FDR. While he became one of the most effective and learned opponents of Communism, Hook never abandoned his socialism. Thirty years later, he declined to support LBJ against the Republican Barry Goldwater, and instead voted in the 1964 presidential election for Eric Hass, the candidate of the minuscule Marxist Socialist Labor Party. Towards the end of his life, when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Reagan, Hook summarised his domestic political philosophy this way: "I am an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax, a secular humanist, and a firm supporter of freedom of choice with respect to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and other domestic measures to which [Reagan] is opposed."

For what my views are worth: I am a reconstructed believer in the welfare state as well as a supporter of the principle of progressive taxation; and I do not support voluntary euthanasia. I also lack a sense of humour sufficiently wry to call myself a socialist. It strikes me as an immense historical hindrance to the cause of the Left in the UK that its dominant party never - or at least, not until Tony Blair - saw the need to revise its ideological premises in the way that the German Social Democrats did in the late 1950s. And while well able to see that socialism was a defunct ideology that breathed its last in the financial crises of the early Mitterrand administration, Blair advanced as its alternative the essentially empty notion of a Third Way between the market and a command economy. But once you make allowance for Hook's idiosyncrasy in keeping alive the label of socialism, his approach to politics is, in my view, one for our age, as it was for his.

May 24, 2008

In its analysis of the Crewe and Nantwich result, The Guardian notes: "It was the biggest Conservative gain since the party took Birmingham Stechford off Labour in 1977 with a swing of 17.6%, the same as Edward Timpson achieved in Crewe yesterday."

Only the most obsessive of political anoraks among my readers will recall the Tory campaign in Stechford, the seat previously held by Roy Jenkins. The youthful candidate, Andrew MacKay (now MP for Bracknell), issued a leaflet calling for an end to immigration. In an interview with New Society (long since merged with the New Statesman) a few months later, MacKay urged the repeal of the Race Relations Act. Consider that these sentiments were uttered at a time of burgeoning support for racist parties. The National Front came third, with 8% of the vote, at Stechford, beating the Liberal candidate.

But now consider this. According to the Guardian's dissection, elsewhere in today's paper, of the miserable Labour campaign in Crewe:

The issue of race also reared its head, with Labour highlighting that Timpson and the Tories were against ID cards for foreign nationals. The Tory MP Eric Pickles, who masterminded Timpson's campaign, was furious that the issue had been raised in a town where, for the most part, locals rub along easily with workers from eastern Europe. "When the circus leaves you have to be careful what you leave behind," said Pickles. "The last thing you want is to stir up concerns about immigration."

I'm unfazed by most by-election ploys, on the grounds that an obviously desperate expedient will be obvious not only to me. But if The Guardian's account is accurate, then Labour's campaign was a peculiarly cynical one. This sort of theme needs to be retired immediately and explicitly from the party's campaigning.

Meanwhile, in The Times, Tim Hames notes the "amazing, spooky frankly, similarity between this by-election and one held at Mid-Staffordshire in 1990". Tim notes many points of similarity, to which I add one. When the Tories lost the Mid-Staffordshire by-election (yet went on to win the 1992 general election, under a new leader), their defeated candidate, Charles Prior, made one of the least gracious speeches of concession that I have heard.

Being the nephew of James Prior (former Employment Secretary under Mrs Thatcher), Charles Prior evidently assumed that a parliamentary career was his right. His bellowing anguish in defeat was painful to watch. It was even less eloquent than its only rival in British politics for wounded, blustering indignation, the "victory" speech by Doug Hoyle in Warrington in 1981. (Hoyle nearly lost a safe Labour seat to the inaugural campaign of the new Social Democratic Party, whose candidate was Roy Jenkins. Had Shirley Williams been the SDP candidate, it is highly likely she would have gained sufficient additional votes to win.)

I say "only" rival, but there is now a competitor, or at least an addition, in this pantheon of graceless losers. She is Tamsin Dunwoody, whose bereavement I sympathise on but whose political ineptitude symbolises the state of Labour under Gordon Brown.

May 23, 2008

I wrote a piece a couple of months ago on the intervention of President Chávez of Venezuela in a dispute between Colombia and Ecuador. I argued that his conduct was bellicose and inflammatory, in marked contrast to the diplomatic efforts of the OAS and the United States. But there was one issue I reserved judgement on. This was the allegation, made by Colombia, of links between Chávez's regime and the terrorist movement Farc.

Well, it appears that the charge is true. The Economist notes, in a characteristically understated way, that documents seen by the magazine "appear to show that Mr Chávez offered the FARC up to $300m, and talked of allocating the guerrillas an oil ration which they could sell for profit. They also suggest that Venezuelan army officers helped the FARC to obtain small arms, such as rocket-propelled grenades, and to set up meetings with arms dealers."

The documents have been recovered from the computers of Raúl Reyes, the Farc leader killed in a Colombian raid inside Ecuador last March. According to an Interpol investigation, the documents are authentic. If so, then there is no room for euphemism. Chávez is supporting a violent insurrectionary movement that abducts and murders civilians.

Writing before Labour's Crewe debacle, Martin Bright notes that the party is "a landscape largely barren of ideas". Writing after the result, Daniel speculates plausibly that Harriet Harman might be a strong contender for the Labour leadership. But I repeat myself.

Martin maintains that "New Labour was always as much an intellectual concept as it was an electoral strategy". I agree in the sense that the change under Tony Blair was ideological as well as presentational, and this was crucial to Labour's becoming a party of government. But I'm profoundly sceptical of the notion of a Third Way, whose origins Martin expounds.

Its significance for Labour was as a vehicle for the belated acceptance of certain essentials of good government: inflation targeting as the goal of monetary policy; the limits of discretionary fiscal policy; the need for trade union power to be subject to the rule of law; the acceptance of our obligations as a member state of Nato and the European Union. But there never was a distinctively left-wing way of doing these things, an esoteric wisdom unknown to the Tories and deriving from Labour's traditions. To the extent that the Third Way encouraged Labour to take these tasks seriously, it helped in the party's evolution. But the Third Way also implied that Labour's aims were always compatible - that in pursuing, say, both economic efficiency and equity, there was no need for trade-offs. That was damaging.

On my reading of his administration, Tony Blair changed his position and tacitly discarded the Third Way. Gordon Brown is ostentatiously not of a Blairite disposition; that was his claim for leadership. I do not consider that Labour will recover under its current leadership, or that any useful purpose will be served by the intellectual quest that Martin calls for. My scepticism about Labour's prospects and disrespect for the PM would hold regardless. But it's worth repeating what a discreditable campaign the party ran in Crewe.

Tony Blair made occasional hair-raisingly partisan assertions. (His "forces of conservatism" speech at the 1999 Labour conference was a shocker. It included the line: "The forces of conservatism allied to racism are why one of the heroes of the 20th Century, Martin Luther King, is dead.") But these tended to be for party consumption, on the part of a leader who was clearly and fortunately not attuned to Labour's more atavistic traditions. The Crewe "Tory toffs" campaign, for which the PM must be held responsible, was stupidly mean-spirited. So, incidentally, was the candidate, who seems to me to have had an unreasonably generous press. When you lose an election on a 17% swing, it's unwise to tell the voters how perverse is their decision - or as Tamsin Dunwoody put it, "I think my mother is turning in her grave."